Thread: Do the days seem to fly by?

I remember when I was young, a year seemed to take forever to pass. Sometimes, a day would just drag on forever.

Now, I can't find enough time in the days and the years just seem to fly by.

Does anybody else feel this way?

Where does the time go?

This is my feelings about why time goes by faster as I get older.

We base time on a year, our birthday happens once a year.

When we are just one year old, a year is our entire life.

When we are 5, that year is now 1/5 of our life.

As we get older, the year that we base our time on, becomes smaller and smaller as we add more years to our life, so it goes by faster and faster.

What do you think?

Are your years going by faster then they were when you were a kid?

I've often had similar thoughts. One issue that you tend to overlook as you get older, you take less and less notice of the things that are familiar. If they take less of your attention they also occupy less of your time perception.

Though when you're adult, there are other issues.

When you're a parent of a sickly infant, the days take forever while the weeks and months just melt away without you even noticing much.

When you're managing kids school, sport, music and the like along with your job and all the household stuff, each day seems like a whirlwind but a school term can take forever.

The most important lesson from all of this is to make the most of every day, every experience. Watch the sunset. Smell the roses.

Some people say that it's our perception of time changing as we grow older, although personally I think that it's our memory of duration is what changes as we grow older rather than our perception of time.

Time has gone by at a constant speed for pretty much my whole life (apart from those times when fun or boredom was an issue) so I can only assume it's the same standard for everybody, but I remember a year seeming to take forever when I was a child, and yet these past 12 months could have just sped by in several weeks.

I don't experience the change in the rate of time while I'm living life, only after the event has occurred and then I think back to remember it, is when the memory of "how long it took" changes over the years.

As we get older we put on weight.
That weight increase means that we have a higher gravity.
Thus, time slows down for us relative to the rest of the of the universe and we see it just zipping past...

(The OP has it nailed as far as I'm concerned).

The more work that needs done that you have to do means that those days are really going fast because you can't find time to finish everything that needs to be done. As you age you find ways to work smarter and therefore get things done almost as they need to be done making time seem to be gradually slowing down. Then as you get to retirement there's less and less that you need to do so now time really slows down for since there's little that needs doing as compared to when you were working you are not moving as quickly.

For some reason, the weekends zip by faster than the work week.

Originally Posted by wegs

For some reason, the weekends zip by faster than the work week.

Because weekends are only two days long and a working week is 5 days!

Everything changes as we move along the time axis, why, there are thousands if not endless reasons, can't put my hands or mind on anything specific.

Originally Posted by Dywyddyr

Originally Posted by wegs

For some reason, the weekends zip by faster than the work week.

Because weekends are only two days long and a working week is 5 days!

I'm blown away by your brilliance, today!

Whenever I see time flying by, I pull out my call, lure it in, and shoot it with a shotgun.

Originally Posted by shlunka

Whenever I see time flying by, I pull out my call, lure it in, and shoot it with a shotgun.

Hard to do that if it's an infestation of Diptera tempus.

I think it has something to do with what you focus on.

When you're younger, you tend to mainly be focused on the present and what is going on in the "now." This allowed us to truly appreciate the moment which makes it appear to last longer.

As we get older (and because of the demands of society), we tend to shift our focus from the present to the future. We are always looking forward to the next deadline, the weekend coming up, or even till your lunch break haha. This gives us less appreciation of the moment. So when we finally reach that point in the future that we were focused on, we look back and feel as though time went by fast but only because we didn't pay attention to it; the lack of attention gives it the "background" effect, how it is always there but we tend to forget about it due to focus on what is in the foreground.

Originally Posted by Daecon

Some people say that it's our perception of time changing as we grow older, although personally I think that it's our memory of duration is what changes as we grow older rather than our perception of time.

Time has gone by at a constant speed for pretty much my whole life (apart from those times when fun or boredom was an issue) so I can only assume it's the same standard for everybody, but I remember a year seeming to take forever when I was a child, and yet these past 12 months could have just sped by in several weeks.

I don't experience the change in the rate of time while I'm living life, only after the event has occurred and then I think back to remember it, is when the memory of "how long it took" changes over the years.

That's an interesting way of looking at memory. In a similar, but departing, vein my guess is that it has to do with the total amount of time spent living. When I was seven I had three, maybe four years worth of information/experience. Now that I'm 24, I have about 20 years of information/experience stored. My thinking is that a year seems like an aeon when you're a child simply because you're comparing it to less overall time spent living. A year seems like a long time if you can only actively recall seven of them ever passing, but going through a whole 15 of them? 25? 50? Will probably seem like less long a time seeing as you're comparing it to decades worth of memory.